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Welcome to Kicking the Seat!

Ian Simmons launched Kicking the Seat in 2009, one week after seeing Nora Ephron’s Julie & Julia. His wife proposed blogging as a healthier outlet for his anger than red-faced, twenty-minute tirades (Ian is no longer allowed to drive home from the movies).

The Kicking the Seat Podcast followed three years later and, despite its “undiscovered gem” status, Ian thoroughly enjoys hosting film critic discussions, creating themed shows, and interviewing such luminaries as Gaspar NoéRachel BrosnahanAmy Seimetz, and Richard Dreyfuss.

Ian is a member of the Chicago Film Critics Association. He also has a family, a day job, and conflicted feelings about referring to himself in the third person.

CHIPS (2017)

The plural-acronym title of 1970s TV series CHiPs stands for "California Highway Patrol". Dax Shepard's baffling bomb of a 2017 feature adaptation is simply called CHIPS, which, like the film itself, stands for nothing--except maybe the writer/director/star's ill-conceived gamble that the "Raunchy Comedy + Brand Recognition" formula works every time. This isn't the self-referential, genre-skewering fun of 21 Jump Street. It’s every bad buddy-cop movie ever, notable only for an alarming bystander body count that makes Man of Steel look like My Little Pony and a running gag in which society at large ranks analingus as being somewhere between first and second base. I laughed a couple times, mostly in disbelief at the ghoulish violence and waste of solid actors (Michael Peña! Vincent D’Onofrio! Jane Kaczmarek! Noooo!). Rubberneckers may key into the darkness and desperation with which Shepard re-interprets a beloved show from his youth. Everyone else should keep driving.

War for the Planet of the Apes (2017)

The Dark Tower (2017)